We Could Be So Good was among my absolute favoritest reads last year, so needless to say, I was pretty damn excited for the sequel. In many ways, my high expectations paid off. This story is, once again, incredibly well-crafted, with evocative prose, clear character voices, deep characterization, relatable themes, and a good sense of setting/time period. My one big grip with it is, I just couldn’t connect with one of the two MCs, Eddie. I sympathized with the baseball slump he was in and the loneliness he was experiencing. I would absolutely call him a well-rounded character. But I just couldn’t get invested in him properly. There was a spark missing. And that, of course, means that it was pretty hard to get invested in the book’s main plot, too, given that it’s a romance. Oops.

I’m not 100% sure what went wrong here; in big part, I think it’s just that thing that happens sometimes. You just don’t vibe with the character, even if they seem cool and interesting, just like sometimes you just don’t vibe with actual people. But as I poke at this, I think it’s also, a tiny bit, the fault of the book itself. It’s generally slow-paced, but Eddie’s part is, at times, moving at a glacial pace, especially the parts that have to do with his relationship with his team and his baseball career in general. And that big slow part just isn’t too interesting. Nothing much ever happens. His teammates aren’t too likable. I think maybe if I was a huge baseball fan, or better yet if I simply *did* vibe with Eddie, I would’ve been okay with focusing on the “character study” parts of it all and enjoying the ride. As it was, I yawned a lot.

On the other hand, Mark’s part of the book was fire, and not a single line in his chapters left me indifferent. I loved every part of his arc: his grief and how he deals with it; his relationship with his queerness and his staunch desire to not lie about who he is; the way he isn’t naturally nice, but he hoards kindness and distributes it where it needs to be; the found family thing he’s got with the characters we know from the previous book (side note: I was SO happy to see them! I just wish there was more Nick!); the friendship he develops with George; the specific ways writing and reading matter to him. My lukewarm feelings for Eddie aside, it made so much sense that Mark started inching toward falling for him by writing about him.

Something I appreciated a lot: just like the first book in the series, this one’s got a grumpy/sunshine dynamic. But! It’s an *entirely* different grumpy/sunshine dynamic. Mark and Eddie, both apart and together, have rather little in common with Nick and Andy. Their individual drives, their chemistry, and their conflicts, inner and interpersonal alike, come from completely different places. This just goes to show how uniquely familiar tropes can be executed, even when it’s done by the same author within the same series.

Also, this novel is definitely a masterclass in showing so much deep characterization through utterly mundane actions, like shopping, dog walking, reading books and talking about them, eating at restaurants, etc. Those completely slice-of life bits were often my favorite.